


Making The Best of It

by CatKing_Catkin



Series: Cheer Up The Skeleton Week [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Bonding, Developing Relationship, Fluff, Fluffy Ending, Friendship, Gen, Happy Sans, Nonbinary Frisk, POV Sans, Post-Undertale Pacifist Route, Sleepovers, Stargazing, Team as Family, Undertale Monsters on the Surface
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 01:47:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8870983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatKing_Catkin/pseuds/CatKing_Catkin
Summary: Written for the "Cheer Up The Skeleton" week on tumblr, Day 1 - prompt "waking up". It's the first night on the surface for the monsters formerly of the Underground. Obviously, this involves figuring a lot of things out and making a lot of little accommodations to their new home. Even finding a place to sleep proves surprisingly troublesome. In the end, they make due with Papyrus' new car.Of course, just because he has a place to sleep doesn't mean Sans can sleep. He can feel himself coming back to life, now that the resets are over. And the human who helped him get this far has a few ideas for how they can explore this brave new world.





	

There shouldn’t have been enough room in Papyrus’ car for all of them to sleep, but they’d made it work.

Papyrus and Undyne slept in the front seats, Papyrus on the driver’s side and Undyne on the passenger’s. They had the seats leaned fully back to accommodate their full heights. Alphys slept curled up on what space remained of the backseats between them, with one of Undyne’s arms draped safely over her.

That left Frisk and Sans to sleep in the trunk. Undyne kept the hatch propped open with one of her spears. It still might have been a tight fit for two humans, or even for a human and a monster who wasn’t a skeleton. Fortunately, skeletons could curl up quite small without such fripperies as muscles and joints to hold them back. Sans made room for the kid. It was the least he could do.

It wasn’t their first night up on the surface. But it was their first night setting forth from the town at the base of the mountain. As the ambassador for monsterkind, Frisk had a lot of people they would need to be talking to soon. And the little village they’d all stumbled into was much too small to house every monster from the Underground. If they wanted jobs and housing, they would need to range further into the outside world to find it. Thus, they all set out together to find it. Toriel would be waiting for them in the next state over, having been approved as a probationary schoolteacher there. Asgore was already in talks with the larger city’s mayor to secure any assistance he could for his people.

Frisk could have flown in with them. They’d asked to take the scenic route with their other friends, instead, the better to show off the surface world. Sans, meanwhile, had disappeared for an hour or so and returned with a car for Papyrus. Undyne had tried to ask how. No one else had bothered, she hadn’t gotten an answer either, and so eventually she’d given up.

Of course, mistakes happened when you put a group of people in a car that only one of them nominally knew how to drive and put them on the road. Hence the reason they were all pulled over to the side of the road to let Papyrus get his mandatory two hours of sleep a night. It didn’t feel like a mistake that had led them all here, though. As Sans lay there and listened to Frisk breathing and Papyrus chattering in his sleep, he just felt content. It was an unfamiliar sort of feeling. He meant to enjoy it while he had it.

He supposed that he must have dozed off after having that thought, because the next thing he knew was Frisk shaking his shoulder and saying his name. From the sound of their voice, soft as it was, they’d been saying his name for a while. Grumbling a little but seeing that they were determined as ever, Sans rolled over to stare blearily up at the human.

“wha’s happening, kid?”

The only available lights were from streetlights and stars. He still saw them smile and motion towards the strip of outside visible through the open trunk door. Grumbling a little, Sans shifted himself over to the gap for the sake of peering outside. All he saw was grass, tree, and an empty highway.

Frisk reached out, rested their small hand against his chin, and tilted his skull up.

And Sans felt the world fall away.

This wasn’t their first night on the surface. But the town, small as it was, had still been full of lights on after dark. And so Sans’ first glimpse of the stars had been less than what it could have been – they’d been great, yes, far more than the glittering gems on the ceiling of Waterfall. But they’d still seemed distant and far away.

The scattered streetlights weren’t anything like as bright, and so Sans was able to get his first _proper_ look at the stars overhead. And they were stunning, so beautiful he couldn’t _think_ , each one bright and brilliant and shining and seeming so close that he could reach out and close his fist over a handful. They even seemed to paint a pathway overhead, a wonderful road that he could walk on if he just made it up there…

Beside him, Frisk scrambled up and out of the trunk. The sound of their feet touching down on the grass brought him back to reality. Sans looked over at them, still wide-eyed and speechless. Frisk motioned for him to follow, and then pointed off into the dark distance. Sans couldn’t have refused them in that moment even if he’d wanted to. He slipped out after them, squeezed their hand when they took his, and let himself be led.

He didn’t immediately realize that the ground beneath their feet was sloping upwards. He didn’t realize that they were climbing a hill until he was able to paint out the deeper shadows it painted against the night sky. Frisk was huffing and puffing a little when they finally reached the top, and even Sans felt the bones in his legs burning a bit with effort. But that was fine, that was fine. The grass was soft when they flopped down onto it, side-by-side, the better to watch the cosmos tilt and spin overhead.

Sans felt something else pressed into his hand. He lifted it up to his eyesocket, turned it this way and that, and finally worked out that it was a tiny telescope, small enough to fit in a pocket. Small enough to have been carried in Frisk’s pocket all this way.

“Sorry,” they whispered quietly. “S’not as nice as the one in Waterfall.”

“it’s great, frisk,” Sans whispered back, taking their hand and squeezing it tight once more to let them know for sure that he meant it. “thanks. for…all of this.”

Their hand was warm and their voice was fond. “You’re welcome.”

Sans lifted the little telescope to his eyesocket, and started to pick out new constellations.


End file.
